jail

On Sunday, August 10, people both inside and outside the prison system came together in solidarity against prisons and the global rise of hyper-incarceration. In 1975 Prison Justice Day began as a day of silence and mourning amongst Canadian prisoners in response to the death of Eddie Nalon which was caused by the negligence of prison guards while Nalon was in solitary confinement. Since then the occasion has spread across the world, fueled by an increasingly widespread understanding of the immense social costs of prisons.

One of the core features of authoritarian systems is the monopoly over the legitimate use of power. Only the authorities are allowed to exercise it. While prison is inherently an authoritarian institution, it is important to be able to recognize it as a microcosm of the ways that more encompassing systems function in our purportedly democratic state. The idea that power is rooted in a people’s consensus is but a fiction manufactured to elicit both complacency and complicity.

The last piece that I posted on this subject was written in this prison a couple of months ago, before I’d been thrown into “the hole” on administrative segregation. I wrote about the prison’s banning of reading material, which they have classified as “anarchist.” Security here has been removing such items from my mail. Prior to that posting I had written about a newly enforced policy at the CNCC that functionally prevents books from being sent in from the outside.